Towards a science of archaeoecology
Authors: Stefani A. Crabtree, Jennifer A. Dunne
Journal: Trends in Ecology & Evolution (2022)

Ecology focuses on understanding the ecological and environmental context of extant and ancient ecosystems, yet often does not include humans explicitly.Archaeology, with its focus on history and prehistory of humans, rarely studies the full ecological context of those systems.Research deeply integrating archaeological and ecological data, questions, and approaches is on the rise.We present the case for an emerging science of 'Archaeoecology', which provides an explicit framework for studying the structure, dynamics, and sustainability of past coupled natural–human systems. We propose defining a field of research called 'archaeoecology' that examines the past ~60 000 years of interactions between humans and ecosystems to better understand the human place within them. Archaeoecology explicitly integrates questions, data, and approaches from archaeology and ecology, and coalesces recent and future studies that demonstrate the usefulness of integrating archaeological, environmental, and ecological data for understanding the past. Defining a subfield of archaeoecology, much as the related fields of environmental archaeology and palaeoecology have emerged as distinct areas of research, provides a clear intellectual context for helping us to understand the trajectory of human–ecosystem interactions in the past, during the present, and into the future. We propose defining a field of research called 'archaeoecology' that examines the past ~60 000 years of interactions between humans and ecosystems to better understand the human place within them. Archaeoecology explicitly integrates questions, data, and approaches from archaeology and ecology, and coalesces recent and future studies that demonstrate the usefulness of integrating archaeological, environmental, and ecological data for understanding the past. Defining a subfield of archaeoecology, much as the related fields of environmental archaeology and palaeoecology have emerged as distinct areas of research, provides a clear intellectual context for helping us to understand the trajectory of human–ecosystem interactions in the past, during the present, and into the future. That was not, in fact, rudimentary or isolated groups, but far-flung networks of societies, spanning diverse ecologies, with people, plants, animals, drugs, objects of value, songs and ideas moving between them in endlessly intricate ways. David Graeber and David Wengrow ([1.Graeber D. Wengrow D. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021Google Scholar], see p. 516). Although modern humans emerged in Africa ~300 000 years ago, their ability to significantly impact ecosystems (e.g., via extinctions and extirpations, or building large settlements) around the world has its roots in the late Pleistocene. Two intertwined trends intensified around 60 000 years ago: the increasing dispersal of Homo sapiens across the globe and the rapid development of technologies enabling humans to interact more effectively with new environments and the species they encountered. As humans spread to new places and their populations grew at local to global scales from the end of the Pleistocene throughout the Holocene, their impacts on ecosystems grew commensurately [2.Saltré F. et al.Climate-human interaction associated with southeast Australian megafauna extinction patterns.Nat. Commun. 2019; 10: 5311Crossref PubMed Scopus (17) Google Scholar, 3.Crabtree S.A. et al.Landscape rules predict optimal superhighways for the first peopling of Sahul.Nat. Hum. 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The question of how humans have interacted with ecosystems through deep time, both in terms of how they impact systems and how systems have shaped human culture and dynamics, is clearly a critical area of research as we confront pressing questions about the sustainability of current and future coupled natural–human systems (e.g., [8.Xu C. et al.Future of the human climate niche.Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 2020; 117: 11350-11355Crossref PubMed Scopus (191) Google Scholar,9.Rick T.C. Sandweiss D.H. Archaeology, climate, and global change in the Age of Humans.Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 2020; 117: 8250-8253Crossref PubMed Scopus (37) Google Scholar]). Increasingly there are calls for integration and synthesis in research on such questions [10.Kintigh K.W. et al.Grand challenges for archaeology.Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. 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Archaeology focuses on the study of human prehistory and history, and, while it often considers the abiotic environmental context and interactions with certain human-related taxa [14.Smith P.J. Grahame Clark's new archaeology: The Fenland Research Committee and Cambridge prehistory in the 1930s.Antiquity. 1997; 71: 11-30Crossref Scopus (17) Google Scholar], it has less frequently focused on the full biotic ecological context. Palaeoecology focuses on reconstructing and analyzing past ecosystems that stretch deep into geological history [15.Rull V. Contributions of paleoecology to Easter Island's prehistory: a thorough review.Quat. Sci. Rev. 2021; 252106751Crossref Scopus (5) Google Scholar]. Here, we propose the coalescence of approaches, methods, topics, and prior and future studies related to the archaeological past of ecosystems under the name archaeoecology, much as palaeoecology emerged at the intersection of palaeontology and ecology during the first half of the 20th century [16.Gekker R.F. Polozheniya i Instruktsiya dlya Ussledovaniy po Paleoekologii [Principles and Instruction for Paleoecological Investigations]. Northwestern Geological Prospecting Trust, 1933Google Scholar]. By combining modern ecological data, analysis, and modeling practices with archaeological data, questions, and approaches, we can better understand the trajectory of human–ecosystem interactions in deep time. While palaeoecology includes studies that extend into the Holocene (e.g., [17.Palacios-Fest M.R. et al.A Paleo-Lake and wetland paleoecology associated with human use of the distal Old River Bed Delta at the Pleistocene-Holocene transition in the Bonneville Basin, Utah, USA.Quat. Res. 2022; 106: 75-93Crossref Scopus (3) Google Scholar]) and environmental archaeology includes ecological approaches in some cases, the subdiscipline names reveal the lack of focus on archaeological (within palaeoecology) and ecological (within environmental archaeology) approaches, questions, and integration. While some ecologically oriented archaeological studies [14.Smith P.J. Grahame Clark's new archaeology: The Fenland Research Committee and Cambridge prehistory in the 1930s.Antiquity. 1997; 71: 11-30Crossref Scopus (17) Google Scholar,18.Crumley C.L. Historical ecology and the study of landscape.Landsc. Res. 2017; 42: S65-S73Crossref Scopus (20) Google Scholar,19.Armstrong C.G. et al.Anthropological contributions to historical ecology: 50 questions, infinite prospects.PLoS ONE. 2017; 12e0171883Crossref Scopus (65) Google Scholar] have begun to grapple with understanding the human place in the broader systems in which they are embedded [20.Revelles J. Archaeoecology. The application of palaeoenvironmental sciences for the reconstruction of human–environment interactions.Appl. Sci. 2021; 11: 8782Crossref Scopus (1) Google Scholar], 'environmental archaeology is more circumscribed, focusing on a single species typically represented by subfossil and archaeological evidence' ([21.Winder I.C. et al.Hominin paleoecology and environmental archaeology.in: Smith C. Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. Springer, 2014: 3450-3456Crossref Google Scholar], see p. 3460). The term 'archaeoecology' is not entirely new; it has been used previously in a more limited way to suggest the use of palaeoecological approaches for systems in the archaeological past [20.Revelles J. Archaeoecology. The application of palaeoenvironmental sciences for the reconstruction of human–environment interactions.Appl. Sci. 2021; 11: 8782Crossref Scopus (1) Google Scholar]. Archaeoecology is, and can be, much more than that, by encouraging the coalescence of approaches and questions from multiple fields, with archaeology, palaeontology, and ecology contributing significantly to the integrated study of past ecosystems. As an explicit area of inquiry, archaeoecology provides an intellectual home for a variety of related studies in recent years scattered across archaeology, ecology and evolution, environmental science, and earth sciences departments. Most importantly, archaeoecology shines a light on the many ways that the study of H. sapiens in ecosystems in the past can aid us in understanding the human place in ecosystems today and into the future. Palaeoecology 'combines biological, geochemical and molecular information from natural archives to reconstruct ecological and evolutionary systems deep into the past' ([11.Seddon A.W.R. et al.Looking forward through the past: identification of 50 priority research questions in palaeoecology.J. 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Afr. Earth Sci. 2020; 169103887Crossref Scopus (3) Google Scholar], permafrost preserved ecosystems [24.Wetterich S. et al.Paleo-Ecology of the Yedoma Ice Complex on Sobo-Sise Island (EasternLena Delta, Siberian Arctic).Front. Earth Sci. 2021; 9681511Crossref Scopus (4) Google Scholar], bog contexts [25.da Silva K.A. et al.Mineral inputs, paleoecological change, and Holocene carbon accumulation at a boreal peatland in the Hudson Bay Lowlands, Canada.Palaeogeogr. Palaeoclimatol. Palaeoecol. 2022; 596110996Crossref Scopus (2) Google Scholar], and other fossilized or preserved remains. These traces of the past have been instrumental in helping to understand the climatic, evolutionary, and ecological trajectory of our planet. Palaeoecological studies have typically focused on species diversity, abundance, and distribution, community composition and dynamics, and extinction dynamics [22.Rull V. Ecology and palaeoecology: two approaches, one objective.Open Ecol. J. 2010; 3: 1-5Crossref Scopus (57) Google Scholar]. More recently, researchers have begun to reconstruct and analyze complex trophic networks of interacting species in the deep past [26.Dunne J.A. et al.Compilation and network analyses of Cambrian food webs.PLoS Biol. 2008; 6: 693-708Crossref Scopus (149) Google Scholar, 27.Yeakel J.D. et al.Collapse of an ecological network in Ancient Egypt.Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 2014; 111: 14472-14477Crossref PubMed Scopus (71) Google Scholar, 28.Lozano S. et al.Exploring paleo food-webs in the European Early and Middle Pleistocene: a network analysis.Quat. Int. 2016; 413: 44-54Crossref Scopus (13) Google Scholar]. By contrast, archaeology is concerned with studying intentionally deposited (e.g., middens and tels) and created remains (e.g., artifacts) plus incidentally preserved traces (e.g., pollen cores), which reflect signals of past human activity in an environmental context. For example, the archaeological record contains middens of trash deposited by humans in the past [29.Needham S. Spence T. Refuse and the formation of middens.Antiquity. 1997; 71: 77-90Crossref Scopus (73) Google Scholar], which include fragments of animals and plants used by humans at different points in time, as elucidated by the practices of zooarchaeology and archaeobotany [30.Fuller D.Q. Lucas L. Archaeobotany.in: Smith C. Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. Springer, 2014: 305-310Crossref Google Scholar,31.Reitz E.J. Wing E.S. Zooarchaeology. 2nd edn. Cambridge University Press, 2008Crossref Google Scholar]. Middens and other intentionally deposited remains can be augmented by other forms of environmental and ecological reconstruction, including tree ring proxies for climate change [32.Hessl A.E. et al.Past and future drought in Mongolia.Sci. Adv. 2018; 4e1701832Crossref PubMed Scopus (62) Google Scholar], isotopic analyses of bones [33.Bird M.I. et al.A global carbon and nitrogen isotope perspective on modern and ancient human diet.Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 2021; 118: 1-17Crossref Scopus (6) Google Scholar], and proteomics to understand past faunal composition [34.Ventresca Miller A.R. et al.The spread of herds and horses into the Altai: how livestock and dairying drove social complexity in Mongolia.PLoS ONE. 2022; 17e0265775Crossref PubMed Scopus (1) Google Scholar]. The addition of methods for reconstructing past temperature [35.Guedes J.D.A. Bocinsky R.K. Climate change stimulated agricultural innovation and exchange across Asia.Sci. Adv. 2018; 4eaar4491Google Scholar], rainfall [6.Bocinsky R.K. Kohler T.A. A 2,000-year reconstruction of the rain-fed maize agricultural niche in the US Southwest.Nat. Commun. 2014; 5: 5618Crossref PubMed Scopus (61) Google Scholar], flood episodes [36.White A.J. et al.Fecal stanols show simultaneous flooding and seasonal precipitation change correlate with Cahokia's population decline.Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 2019; 116: 5461-5466Crossref PubMed Scopus (15) Google Scholar], and climatic shifts [37.Smith B.D. Zeder M.A. The onset of the Anthropocene.Anthropocene. 2013; 4: 8-13Crossref Scopus (353) Google Scholar] via modern methods has enhanced understanding of the environmental context of past cultures. Building on aspects of palaeoecology and archaeology, archaeoecology is the branch of science that uses archaeological, ecological (biotic), and environmental (abiotic) records to recreate past complex ecosystems, including human roles, impacts, and dynamics (Figure 1), leveraging advances in statistical, computational, and theoretical analysis, and modeling of complex systems. Archaeoecology is driven by a central focus on the ecological contexts that humans in the past lived in, how those ecosystems changed over time both naturally and through direct and indirect human intervention, and how systems of the past led to the coupled natural–human systems we have today, with implications for the future. It does this by bringing together data, in stratigraphical contexts, on human-compiled materials and incidental environmental and ecological traces. Combined with the use of various computational approaches, such as agent-based modeling (ABM), network structure analyses, and dynamical modeling, as well as theoretical frameworks, such as metabolic scaling theory [38.Hamilton M.J. et al.The complex structure of hunter–gatherer social networks.Proc. R. Soc. B Biol. 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Archaeoecology provides an explicit context for building, analyzing, and modeling ecosystems in the human past, thus encouraging the more detailed study of the interdependencies of human and non-human taxa in the past. Several of the methodological cornerstones of environmental archaeology are relevant for archaeoecology. Geoarchaeology enables the understanding of site formation processes (e.g., [41.Smith M.F. Geoarchaeological investigations at the Ryan-Harley Paleoindian site, Florida (8JE1004): implications for human settlement of the Wacissa River Basin during the Younger Dryas.Geoarchaeology. 2020; 35: 451-466Crossref Scopus (8) Google Scholar]). Archaeobotany, palynology, and zooarchaeology can help identify the animals and plants that humans brought back to a site, or arrived at a site without human intervention (e.g., via wind). Tree ring analysis [42.Douglass A.E. The secrets of the Southwest solved by talkative treerings.Natl. Geogr. 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These and other approaches can be used to augment our understanding of past ecological networks in the form of, for example, food webs that include humans [40.Crabtree S.A. et al.Reconstructing ancestral Pueblo food webs in the southwestern United States.J. Archaeol. Sci. 2017; 81: 116-127Crossref Scopus (17) Google Scholar,47.Dunne J.A. et al.The roles and impacts of human hunter-gatherers in North Pacific marine food webs.Sci. Rep. 2016; 6: 21179Crossref PubMed Scopus (39) Google Scholar], human-mediated extinction cascade studies [48.Burgio K.R. et al.Lazarus ecology: recovering the distribution and migratory patterns of the extinct Carolina parakeet.Ecol. Evol. 2017; 7: 5467-5475Crossref PubMed Scopus (12) Google Scholar], and human-induced mutualistic networks. Mutualistic networks, from an archaeoecological perspective, hold the potential for understanding the historical roots of the current distribution of various taxa [49.Boivin N.L. et al.Ecological consequences of human niche construction: examining long-term anthropogenic shaping of global species distributions.Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 2016; 113: 6388-6396Crossref PubMed Scopus (392) Google Scholar] and, thus, have implications for research on extant ecosystems. Of particular interest are the roles and impacts of humans within those systems [50.Monks C. The role of terrestrial, estuarine, and marine foods in dynamic Holocene environments and adaptive coastal economies in Southwestern Australia.Quat. Int. 2021; 597: 5-23Crossref Scopus (2) Google Scholar], as well as the robustness and vulnerability of human and non-human populations to dynamics and perturbations at multiple spatial and temporal scales in the context of complex trophic interactions and other types of dependencies. An important part of this endeavor includes working with 'traditional ecological knowledge' (TEK) [51.Molnár Z. Babai D. Inviting ecologists to delve deeper into traditional ecological knowledge.Trends Ecol. Evol. 2021; 36: 679-690Abstract Full Text Full Text PDF PubMed Scopus (16) Google Scholar], knowledge of species, ecosystems, and environments passed down from prior generations. TEK allows humans to enhance critical ecosystem services through activities such as grassland promotion [52.Moritz M. et al.Emergent sustainability in open property regimes.Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. 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Both social sciences and ecology use agent-based models, (known as individual-based models in ecology). These models can account for multiple interacting variables and can be used in conjunction with various types of archaeological and ecological data and inferences to analyze changing ecosystems over time [57.Rogers J.D. Cegielski W.H. Building a better past with the help of agent-based modeling.Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 2017; 114: 12841-12844Crossref PubMed Scopus (10) Google Scholar,58.d'Alpoim Guedes J.A. et al.Twenty-first century approaches to ancient problems: climate and society.Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 2016; 113: 14483-14491Crossref PubMed Scopus (73) Google Scholar]. Using these and other types of computational modeling to leverage the archaeological record to understand past ecosystems can also help calibrate our understanding of extant systems. The application of computational modeling and the weaving together of disparate data sets [59.Crabtree S.A. Klain S.C. Weaving frames of knowledge.Aust. Archaeol. 2021; 87: 307-308Crossref Scopus (2) Google Scholar] differentiates archaeoecology and helps motivate analyses of past systems that incorporate both the biotic and abiotic contexts (Box 1).Box 1An opportunity for archaeoecologyHere, we discuss a long-term multidisciplinary environmental archaeology study that could provide the foundation for a fully developed archaeoecological study.An example of using archaeological data to advance dynamic understanding of ancient ecosystems can be found in work looking at the settlement of Cyprus at the end of the Mesolithic (~11 000 BP [60.Zeder M.A. Domestication and early agriculture in the Mediterranean Basin: origins, diffusion, and impact.Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 2008; 105: 11597-11604Crossref PubMed Scopus (626) Google Scholar]). The Neolithic settlers who came to Cyprus brought with them several nondomesticated animals and plants, including fox (Vulpes vulpes indutus), deer (Dama dama), pistachios (Pistacia vera), flax (Linum sp.), and figs (Ficus carica), to alter the Cyprian ecosystem to meet their needs [49.Boivin N.L. et al.Ecological consequences of human niche construction: examining long-term anthropogenic shaping of global species distributions.Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 2016; 113: 6388-6396Crossref PubMed Scopus (392) Google Scholar,60.Zeder M.A. Domestication and early agriculture in the Mediterranean Basin: origins, diffusion, and impact.Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 2008; 105: 11597-11604Crossref PubMed Scopus (626) Google Scholar,61.Zeder M.A. The origins of agriculture in the Near East.Curr. Anthropol. 2011; 52: S221-S235Crossref Scopus (274) Google Scholar]. These were supplemented with domestic einkorn (Triticum monococcum) and barley (Hordeum vulgare), as well as domesticated pigs (Sus scrofa), sheep (Ovis sp.), goat (Capra sp.), and cattle (Bos sp.). The impacts that these early settlers had on the ecosystem are still felt today, predicated on a landscape that was substantially transformed by humans starting ~10 000 years ago.Assembling this narrative required different lines of archaeological, environmental, and ecological evidence [60.Zeder M.A. Domestication and early agriculture in the Mediterranean Basin: origins, diffusion, and impact.Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 2008; 105: 11597-11604Crossref PubMed Scopus (626) Google Scholar]. First, archaeologists needed to describe the ecosystem prior to the arrival of the Neolithic settlers, requiring excavations that provided data on the baseline, prehuman system. From those data, archaeologists were able to infer the arrival of various noncultivated plants and animals that appear endemic to Cyprus today but were likely brought from the mainland. The coincidence of their arrival with the arrival of early migrants is highly suggestive of intentional niche construction. The same applies to nondomesticated foxes and deer, which were likely introduced [49.Boivin N.L. et al.Ecological consequences of human niche construction: examining long-term anthropogenic shaping of global species distributions.Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 2016; 113: 6388-6396Crossref PubMed Scopus (392) Google Scholar]. Were scientists to describe and model the 'natural' state of Cyprus without humans by removing only humans and their direct domesticates (wheat, barley, and domesticated animals), the ecosystem they describe would be an anthropogenic one merely without humans and a few closely associated taxa.To move this work beyond a nuanced environmental archaeological exploration and into the realm of archaeoecology would require the next step of ecological analysis and modeling. Methods, such as species distribution models and food web approaches, could make use of the detailed data documenting changes in flora and fauna compiled by Zeder and colleagues as the foundation for extending the ecological scope and depth of their research [60.Zeder M.A. D